By : OnCloudERP Team | Posted : 24-June-2019
The need for a robust ERP to succeed in today’s competitive business ecosystem has become more relevant than ever. Almost every successful organization operates efficiently, thanks to its core framework of an end-to-end ERP system. With ERP gaining such critical significance as being the nervous system of every enterprise, there’s obviously too many technology experts offering premium solutions with a wide range of benefits - from cost savings to AI-driven operational efficiencies.
Markets Watch Research has indicated that the global Cloud ERP market is well on its way to showing exponential growth, expecting a revenue generation of about 47 billion between 2017 and 2022. Hence one of the critical challenges that enterprises face is in determining what type of ERP solution would best suit their requirement and what approach should they follow while choosing the right technology partner who can help them with their ERP-related transition journey.
Here are the top critical options that needs to be considered while selecting a good ERP software
A good ERP application should be responsive, provide easy navigation, enable smooth workflows, support personalization and drive hassle-free integration with third-party tools along with delivering a great user experience. Placing ease of use as the key factor in determining the user interface helps your team to be more productive and support them in effectively completing their tasks at hand. Additionally, it should be easy to train new employees so that they can learn and quickly adopt the ERP application for their work.
In today’s world an ERP application must support multiple devices such as desktop and mobile. Initially, ERP software was primarily used only by large-scale enterprise companies. Later, as SMBs started adopting ERP applications to improve their productivity businesses started expanding way beyond the four walls of the office spaces. The need to deliver maximum benefits and a consistent user experience across devices became critical. On contrary, legacy ERP systems that are often tied to office systems pose immense challenges to end users. So a cloud ERP application ensures that your teams are better connected anytime, anywhere, and from any device.
An ERP cannot be a standalone system in any organization. It may have to be integrated with third-party applications that you are already using or plan to integrate within the future. If those systems have integration capability, the ERP must also have an integration interface with API protocols. Focus on a solution whose functionality can be easily extended through customization/integrations. The application should also have integration capabilities with web services to connect to middleware platforms to access data from other sources. Standard ERP applications have robust integration tools.
The ERP that one chooses will also need to scale as the business grows and expands. In addition to functionality and business process changes, it should have the capacity to include many users at different locations, business units and multi-plants with multiple currencies, languages and software support. Scalability should also ensure that with the system it is easy to add or modify certain features with the changing business needs, without touching the code of the applications.
ERP should be multi-currency, multi-time zone, and multi-region friendly. For example, the moment you choose India, GST should apply. This will save time and cost and it will be more of a plug and play. Some ERPs are implemented in a weeks’ time, without many complexities, since they cover all the functions and processes of industry best practices.
Choosing an application that is worth the money spent on it is always a critical criterion. Enterprises should always aim at comparing pricing details across multiple applications. Adopting a SaaS Business model provides many benefits over traditional on-premise software installations. The following are the benefits offered by SaaS ERP model:
1. No infrastructure costs
2. Flexible and scalable model
3. Worry free upgrades
4. Easy implementation
5. Subscription billing
6. Minimal IT involvement